In 2009 it is a difficult mental stretch (even for those who were alive and politically conscious back then as this reviewer was) to realize that forty-five years previously most average Americans sincerely believed that their government told them the truth--especially if it concerned things as serious as the assassination of a president or going to war.

As you watch part 2 of this documentary, you are seeing the genesis and the source of the cynicism, detachment, and growing antagonism of ordinary Americans towards both their government and its (as oppossed to their)military.

In 1964 most of the military was composed of draftees whose enlistment was based on the notion of serving the contrry trhat had given them so much. Today our military consists of so many "professionals" (a polite way of saying for hire mercinaries like the Hessians the British used to wage war agsint the colonists during the
Revolutionary War) whose fealty is to their chain of command and pay and benefits and not to the country or its Constitution.

In 1964 and 1965 powerful political leaders like William Fulbright, Wayne Morse, and Hubert Humphrey spoke directly for attribution. Today reporter/stenographers whisper rumors and gossip from "unnamed sources" speaking "off the record" and "not for attribution".

In '68 when Walter Cronkite called LBJ and McNamara's bluffing over the Vietnam war's winability the president realized that he had just lost middle Amerricaand declined to run for a second elected term. Today when confronted with their lying, criminal actions, and (in the case of Barack Obama) broken promises the response is either "So?!!" or indifferent silence.

I am not sure of the date of the Bishop Fulton Sheen clip (the communist scavenger) at the very end of part 2 of this documentary. However, whether it predates or came after, it is very similar to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr had to say on 04/04/67 (one year to the day before he was assassinated) in opposition to the Vietnam war.

"It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries.

This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated.

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

Substitute "radical Islamic fundamentalism" for "communism" or "Marxism" and you realize that essentiall nothing has changed in the 42 years since King made these observations.

If you go and listen to King's speech (The American Rhetoric website has the speech avaiable)you will be struck at how precisely right King was in all of his observations. No wonder he too was killed.

Mark Twain once observed, "The first casualty of any war is the truth" and as you watch part two of this splendid documentary series what you are watching is the assassination of the truth surrounding US involvement in the Vietnam civil war.

I gave this segment a 4 star review primarily due to the extended insertion of speculative (though informed) gossip about LBJ's involvement in the murder of JFK from the history channel's "The Men who Killed Kennedy" series.

While interesting, this material cannot be compared to the value of the straight file footage verifying the facts from the men who were there and in high positions to know exactly what went on to provoke American involvement in the Vietnam civil war.

Given the thorougness of the control exerted by the perpetrators of such crimes, the anonymiity of the producers of this documentary, and its continued availability for viewing, it is also worth wondering if this production's existence is both a boast and a warning by the perps of such crimes to any future politicians or other leaders about who is really in charge and what they are capable of doing.